Famous (A Famous novel)

by Jenny Holiday

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Emmy,” he said, turning to her and placing his hands on her shoulders. The physical contact was at once jolting and calming, which should have been a contradiction but somehow wasn’t. He hadn’t touched her since that night in the attic last week, which she’d been doing her best to forget about. Even when they sat side by side on the porch swing, which they’d taken to doing in the evenings regardless of Mrs. Johansen’s social calendar, they carefully maintained a respectable distance, like a courting couple from centuries past. “It would be really great if you could help me with this. And you know what? I think it would also be good for you to get out of the house. You’ve been cooped up for a week.” He paused and frowned. “But if you can’t do it…you can’t do it.”

  Whoa. Emmy’s body almost recoiled physically from the shock. It was almost like Evan was…expressing disappointment in her? That wasn’t something that happened. Ever. Another thing that never happened was people challenging her when she said something. In her regular life, if she expressed a desire to do something—or not do something, as in this case—the people around her automatically made it so, arranging the world to her liking.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.” She swallowed. “I’m crazy nervous, though. I’ve never taught anyone anything before.”

  “Don’t think of it as teaching. Have a conversation about music.”

  “Okay.” Nodding to convince herself more than anything, she followed him past a gym that was hosting a pick-up basketball game and into a room with a bunch of folding chairs and several large tables covered with art supplies.

  They were met inside the entrance by Kaylee, the student who had intercepted Evan outside his house on Emmy’s first day in Dane.

  Evan performed introductions, referring to Emmy as his “friend,” which made Kaylee’s eyes dart back and forth between Emmy and Evan several times. “Kaylee is one of my students, and she helps me out with this group.”

  A smile appeared on Kaylee’s face as she shook Emmy’s hand, but Emmy could tell it was fake. “I like your hair,” Kaylee said. “It’s really…bold.”

  Los Angeles had schooled Emmy in the fine art of recognizing shade. And Kaylee, with her peaches-and-cream complexion and strawberry blond hair, did not like Emmy’s horrible trailer park goth dye job. Or Emmy. But even though Emmy was pretty much incompetent at regular life, she knew enough to know that getting into some kind of girl war with a twenty-year-old college student with a crush on her professor was unseemly. So she surveyed the room. There were six kids sitting in a clump toward the front of the room talking, a pair huddled near the back in what looked like a private confab, and a boy sitting by himself off to one side.

  “Hey, everyone,” Evan said, and the conversation among the main group stopped. Most of its members returned his greeting, but the lone boy remained silent. “This is my friend Emmy.”

  Emmy waved.

  “Emmy plays guitar,” Evan said, “and I thought she could jam with those of you who might be interested.” He looked at the sullen boy off to the side as he spoke, but the boy’s eyes stayed on the floor where they had been glued since Emmy and Evan arrived.

  “Jam with those of you who might be interested?” she echoed, purposefully amping up the incredulity in her voice. “Thank you, Professor Winslow. Are you, like, sixty years old? I don’t think anyone actually calls it ‘jamming’ anymore.”

  That got a laugh from much of the crowd, and the boy looked up, though he did not smile.

  “I don’t know, you guys. I brought my guitar with me. We can play some music if you like. What are your favorite songs?”

  “‘Crush Me’!” one of the pair of girls at the back shouted, naming a pop song Emmy detested that was currently ruling the charts.

  But hey, she aimed to please. So she opened her guitar case, strapped on her trusty Gibson, and played the trite opening chords of the song. Funny to think, here she was, one of the most successful women in the music industry, intimidated enough by a bunch of kids to cheerfully play crap for them.

  It worked. The previously chattering girls fell silent. Emmy was tempted to sing the first verse, but she was afraid they would recognize her voice so she said, “You guys will have to sing. I don’t know the words.”

  After a plodding and somewhat painful rendition, Evan stepped in. “Okay, those of you who are working on paintings come over to this table, and Kaylee and I will nose around and help anyone who needs it.”

  After a few minutes, everyone except the boy she suspected was Jace, the kid Evan had told her about, was involved in the art. He sat, unmoving, absorbed in his phone.

  Well, here went nothing. Emmy ambled over to him with her guitar. “Not a ‘Crush Me’ fan?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Me either,” she said.

  That got his attention. He looked up with eyebrows raised before schooling his face back into its default bored expression. He wore cowboy boots, faded jeans that were too old to be on trend, and an equally faded T-shirt. All that was missing was the ten-gallon hat, and he’d be a perfect baby cowboy.

  “You’re more of a country fan, maybe?” she said.

  He shrugged and said, “Yeah, and classic rock.”

  She strummed the opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven,” a song that appealed to sullen teenage boys across time immemorial.

  Bingo. He perked right up.

  “You know it?” she said, handing the guitar over. “Evan—Professor Winslow—said you play?”

  “Not really,” he said, coloring a little. “My dad gave me a guitar. I try to teach myself from YouTube tutorials.”

  She pushed the guitar closer to him, and he took it. “Your dad plays?”

  He shrugged. “He’s not…around anymore.”

  Right. Sucky parents. She got that.

  He took a long time arranging his fingers for the first chord. She nodded her encouragement as he started strumming. He struggled with the change from D to F major.

  She crouched in front of him and arranged his fingers. “I usually find it easier to place my ring finger first and use that as a kind of anchor for the rest.”

  He was a quick study. It was a bit clunky, but he picked up the pace as he progressed through the song, and Emmy was quick to praise him when he was done.

  They settled into a rhythm after that and actually started having fun. Jace had some talent, and by the end of the session, she’d planted the idea in his mind that he should write his own song.

  “I don’t think I’m good enough,” he said, still strumming her guitar.

  “But that’s the cool thing about music,” she said. “There is no good enough. It’s not like you’re in competition with anyone. It’s just you and your guitar. You write a song. The end. There doesn’t have to be an audience. You can write for yourself.” She thought of the song she had almost finished last night, with the working title “Garden Salad.” Both it and the songs she’d written earlier in the week felt like that. They were songs she’d written for her, not because she was trying to create a hit, but because she simply wanted to write them. She hadn’t done that for years.

  “That’s true,” he said, his forehead wrinkling. “It’s not like normal people like us are ever going to, like, get a record contract.”

  Evan chose that moment to stroll over, and Emmy glanced up at him. He was standing behind Jace so only she could see his face—which he appeared to be trying very hard to keep neutral. His amusement was contagious. Emmy had to press her own lips together hard to keep from laughing, and the “Right” she issued in agreement with Jace came out sounding slightly strangled.

  “But what should I write about?” Jace asked. “My life is boring.”

  “Don’t think of it in crude terms like boring or exciting,” Emmy said. “Songwriting is about…details.” Like the garden salad. She had never had to instruct anyone in how to write a song before, and she was struggling to articulate her approach. “You start with a detai
l, then you telescope it into something bigger. Your jumping-off point can be totally mundane. What are you doing later today?”

  “Fixing a fence.” He made a face like he’d tasted something bad.

  “Okay,” she said. “But what does that mean, specifically? How are you going to do it? What is the fence for?”

  “It’s a chain link fence. We have dogs. Well, they were my dad’s dogs…”

  He trailed off, and she suppressed a surge of excitement. An absent dad, left-behind dogs—this was going to be easier than she’d thought.

  “So your dad left these dogs behind when he left you,” she prompted, feeling no need to sugarcoat the situation. Evan’s eyebrows shot up. Shit. Maybe she shouldn’t have spoken so frankly. Evan was the one with teaching experience. It was just that she thought most kids appreciated being spoken to like adults. And she was pretty sure this kid in particular didn’t need people tiptoeing around, using euphemisms to talk about what had happened to him.

  “Yeah. Two of them. Pit bulls.” His voice had gone raspy, and he cleared his throat before continuing. “My mom wanted to get rid of them once it became clear that my dad…wasn’t coming back. I wanted to keep them. I’m not even really sure why. They’re kind of miserable dogs.”

  Jace blushed as he spoke, embarrassed that he had hung on to the dogs.

  “They were something you had left of your father,” Emmy said matter-of-factly. “They’re a tie to him.”

  “Anyway,” Jace said, shrugging as if brushing off her interpretation, “my mom and I struck a deal that I could keep them if I built a pen outside, which I did. But I used this shitty, old chain link because it’s all I could get. It’s gotten a bunch of holes, and it needs patching.” He rolled his eyes as if the chore was a familiar lodestone around his neck. “It always needs patching.”

  Emmy glanced around, noticing that Evan was the only one left in the room—the other kids had gone, as had Kaylee. Which was probably why he’d strolled over to eavesdrop on her conversation with Jace. She’d been so tuned into the kid that she hadn’t noticed the session was over, hadn’t heard them cleaning up all the art supplies. And in fact, the room was filling up with middle-aged women dressed in workout gear.

  All right, then. She stood and brushed her hands together. “So, Jace, you have a father who abandoned you. You have holes to patch. Holes you’re constantly patching, it sounds like, to keep your connection to him. I’d say that song is pretty much going to write itself.”

  “Huh?” he said, looking so genuinely befuddled that she almost laughed.

  “Metaphor,” she said. “Metaphor. And this isn’t even a very subtle one.”

  “Zumba starts in two minutes, ladies!” said a perky brunette dressed in a leotard and miniskirt.

  “Broken fences. Broken hearts.” Emmy patted Jace on the shoulder as she picked up her guitar. “Metaphor. Google that shit. Then think: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.”

  Emmy was spectacular.

  It was the only word Evan could think to deploy. He had spent an entire year leading the after-school arts group, and Jace had spent an entire year sitting in the back row looking at his feet, which had always mystified Evan, because it wasn’t like attendance was mandatory. The school district identified kids in need of enrichment, and the community center provided a bus from the high school. And now that it was summer, the program was extra-optional since the kids had to get themselves there. And yet there was Jace, every week, scowling and silent.

  Why are you here? Evan wanted to shout at him sometimes.

  And then Emmy strolls over there, and within minutes Jace is playing her guitar, which was no doubt some kind of priceless Cadillac of guitars, and looking at her like she’s the fucking sunrise. Well, Evan could maybe understand the sentiment, but what the hell? Then she starts getting all in his face about his problems like she’s in a cage baiting a grizzly bear or something, except she actually thinks it’s a cuddly bunny. Oh, and then she finishes it all off with a dollop of “metaphor.” Like Jace would know a metaphor if it bit him in the ass.

  And, eff him, it works.

  He shouldn’t have been so surprised. He’d invited her for this very reason. He had assumed, though, that it would be harder. He’d imagined a montage from a movie in which the earnest but out-of-touch teacher is tested by her jaded students, but reaches them in tiny increments, week after week.

  But, no. For Emmy, it was easy.

  But then that shouldn’t have surprised him, either. He’d been living with Emmy for a week and a bit, but he still couldn’t understand how it was possible for someone to go through the world with such…effortlessness. No, “effortless” wasn’t the right word. He’d heard Emmy working. She spent hours fiddling around with her guitar. He could hear the same musical snippets being played over and over. And music aside, the amazing progress she’d made on his house—she’d expanded on his original to-do list—hadn’t been the result of a magic wand or a Mary-Poppins-like immunity to the laws of physics.

  No, it wasn’t effortlessness so much as it was competence. Complete and utter competence.

  It was an incredible turn-on.

  “Why are you so good at everything?” he asked before he could think better of it.

  She shot him a questioning look as she walked through the door he held for her, preceding him into the hot, sunny afternoon.

  “What was that in there?” he pressed. “You’re like the sullen teen whisperer or something.”

  She shrugged and donned the hat and wraparound sunglasses she always wore outside. “He’s got it inside him, I’m pretty sure. He only needed a nudge.”

  He wanted to tell her she didn’t need the hat and glasses. Her tent-like shirts—this one sported a picture of a cat saying “Check Meowt”—not only hid her body, but it was like they hid her essence or something. She’d met a bunch of teenagers this afternoon—her core demographic—and no one had recognized her. The hat and monster sunglasses were overkill, he was pretty sure. In fact, paradoxically, these tools of disguise actually served to call attention to her. The punny, frumpy T-shirts worked, but no one wore her brand of big, floppy hat around here. This was ball cap territory, and you proclaimed yourself town or gown depending on whether yours had a sports team or a fertilizer brand on it.

  But mostly he wanted to be able to see her eyes. Even though they, too, were disguised with color contacts.

  He kept his mouth shut.

  “Anyway,” she went on. “I don’t know how you can say I’m good at everything. I’m good at maybe a small subset of things.” It was his turn to raise incredulous eyebrows. “Hello, burgers?” she said. “The burger inferno?”

  “So you’re not a natural chef. There’s always more casserole.”

  “That front bedroom!” she said with an urgency that made him laugh. It was like she was arguing a case in court—against herself. “Do you know how many coats of paint I had to do?”

  He shook his head. He had tried to talk her out of painting one of the guest bedrooms, but she had proclaimed its peeling peach walls an affront to humanity, made him choose a new color from among a handful of paint chips, and gotten to work.

  “Six!” she cried emphatically, as if resting her case in front of a jury. “Why? Because I did not use primer. It seemed like an unnecessary step, but primer—who knew?”

  He grinned and shook his head. She was adorable in her indignation.

  “Like, I googled everything, and I learned about taping and all that, and then I just skipped the primer. Because apparently I thought I was smarter than the Home Depot website.”

  Evan’s grin boiled over into laughter, and it felt good. Strange, but good.

  Also good? The thought that if the pattern of the past week held, they would go home, go their separate ways for the rest of the afternoon—he to his grading and lesson planning and she to her music—and then they would come together to defrost some casserole and sit on the porch to eat. Mrs. Johansen ha
d a date with a new man, so they would undoubtedly be up late waiting for her to come home. Sitting on the swing, shooting the breeze, maybe singing some songs, watching the stars and the fireflies come out.

  The prospect was almost painful in its perfection. So at some point his laugh changed. He’d been laughing at her self-deprecation because it was funny. But now, it seemed, he was laughing for the pure, stupid unhinged joy in doing so. It was almost like—

  “What, pray tell, is so amusing?”

  That voice. It was like in old silent movies when the villain comes on screen and the score takes a menacing turn. It was also a surefire way to put an end to the laughter it was asking about.

  Shit.

  But, he reminded himself, this was merely an annoyance. Not the end of the world. If Kaylee and the kids hadn’t recognized Emmy, a middle-aged academic certainly wouldn’t. Evan was completely confident in Emmy’s disguise.

  Completely.

  Mostly.

  It was just that if he had to pick out the last person in the world he wanted to know he was harboring one of the most famous women in the world in his house, it was—

  “Professor Larry Williams.” Larry stuck his hand in Emmy’s face. “Chair of art history at Dane College,” he added, like he thought his job title was as important and impressive as “brain surgeon” or “president of the United States.” When he added, “Bellows scholar,” Evan had to work very hard to prevent his eyeballs from rolling out of his head. God. He had to get tenure, if only because once he had job security he would no longer have to stand around listening to this arrogant prick.

  “Emmy Anderson,” Emmy said, shaking his hand. “Civilian.”

  Ha. She’d picked up on Larry’s self-important tone and was subtly mocking it. No wonder she was such a talented songwriter and performer. She had a way of putting together words, and pitching her delivery of them, that was masterful.

  “Emmy’s an old friend of mine,” Evan said. “From Miami.” Which was not untrue, exactly.

  Larry’s eyes brightened. He was forever trying to pry into Evan’s previous life, always asking about the trial, and Evan always doggedly stonewalled. Evan was polite—he had to be—but they both knew that his past wasn’t relevant to his job performance, so he never gave Larry an opening.